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it has to draw its personnel largely from persons who could not secure appointments to the other services. The Army, Navy, Public Health Service, and Veteran’s Bureau have devised a salary gradation depending upon an officer’s years in service and his ability. Thus, a physician entering any one of these services can look forward to a future with a more responsible position and an income commensurate with his ability and added duties. The Indian Service physician has in the past entered at a definite salary with no promise of a further really material increase unless all other physicians are raised at the same time, irrespective of tenure of office or ability. It has been the policy of the present medical administration to raise all physicians to what might be considered a minimum salary and gradually weed out those who were incompetent. During the past year it has been possible in some instances to increase the salaries of a few physicians who may be considered exceptional. The maximum pay now offered should be the minimum. Any physician worth employing should start at the present maximum figure, and, in addition, should have a definite future toward which to work.
A physician may have been in the Service for years in a position where he was both superintendent and physician and received a superintendent’s salary; yet if he is transferred to a full time physieian’s position, he is forced to accept a much lower rate of pay. An instance of this was seen in the field where a physician in the service for twenty years was reduced in pay when transferred to a full-time medical position.
The present practice of deducting a specific amount from the salary of every physician for the quarters he occupies is unfair. One case will be cited as an example, in principle, of numerous others seen in the field. At one agency the physician and his wife, who is the school hospital nurse, are obliged to live in a single room 10 x 10 feet in the hospital and to share the patients’ sanitary facilities. This situation is due to two factors. The nurse must be on duty twenty-four hours a day and at present no residence is available for a physician. From the salary of each of these employees is deducted the same amount as if they had quarters outside the hospital.
Physicians who are obliged to live in some of the houses available can hardly be expected to maintain the standards expected of a doctor. At one reservation, for example, the physician is housed